I am a little bit like a zombie today. In hindsight I think there was a bit too much walking yesterday. The Gee family motto for city break is “If you aren’t ready to collapse in a heap with your legs turned to jelly after one day you are doing this wrong,” so I feel I have done my family proud. As the weather has turned it seems the best possible solution is… MUSEUMS!

Attempt number ein – The Fragrance Museum. Thwarted by missing the tram and turning up 5 minutes too late for the English language tour. However, the lady who works in the shop gives us a brief history of Farina, the Italian dude who invented Eau de Cologne. My friend and I get a tester of the fragrance on our right wrists and it’s actually still quite a pleasant smell after all this time. The error we make is trying out a tester on our own of the new star sign related scents . This splashes all over our left wrists and down most of our arms. We pretty much stink for the rest of the day and no amount of washing removes the scent. [ By the end of the day I decide I actually like the scent and am going to buy the Pisces perfume tomorrow.]

Attempt number zwei – Wallraf-Richartz Museum. Mainly ecclesiastical art as the impressionist gallery is closed for a new exhibition. My newly acquired biblical knowledge from the York Mystery Plays really comes in handy;I am especially happy to be able to now identify the harrowing of hell in the pieces which show Christ’s life. My friend and I spend a lot of time amusing ourselves by making up captions for the paintings. In one God appears in bubbles watching Job and his family as if God were part of a cosmic CCTV system. In another Jesus talks to his Dad on what seems to be a prototype for Skype in the clouds while judas plots in the front of the painting.

And then there are the mini images of the donors of the paintings, knelt piously, totally incongruous to the usually emotionally charged scenes. In one, the female saint looks like she’s going “Psst, Psst, don’t look now, but tell me who is that tiny person kneeling there?” to another saint. In another Mary’s looking down at the huge family of donors at the bottom of a crucifixion scene as if to say, “I don’t remember all these people here.” [In the evening, my friend and I are in fits of laughter, over these online examples of the same irreverent art jokes: Two Monks Invent Medieval Art

Upstairs in the Baroque section my friend and I are surprised to find gigantic modern photos. This is part of a project, Rubens, Du un Ich, to reproduce the image found in a Rubens with young people. A photo booth is set up so visitors can take a picture for the blog which accompanies this project. So, you know, we have to, all for the sake of art and all.

Attempt number drei –Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. After lunch we hurry through the rain to the anthropology museum. This is a very modern, interactive museum which tries to show how displays in museums are constructing stories which may not be very accurate, that there are always multiple narratives to tell and that what to us may be an object of art, to the original owners was a functional tool. It also conveys a good sense of the wonder that the first collectors felt as they travelled around the globe.

Another packed day… tomorrow it is time for some last minute shopping and then the long journey back to York.

1x Very strong espresso to start the day.
1x Iced Coffee after the cemetery in the boiling sun.

Food Consumed:

Breakfast – German bread, cheese, half a pain au chocolat.

Lunch: Beef Goulash and bread from a restaurant that only sells this one thing, in one size, and you get extra sauce all for 4 euros.

Afternoon: Two types of cherry cake – half of each.

Transport:

4x trips on underground
4x trips on trams
countless miles on foot.

Sights seen:

Morning:

The Dom: well here’s some gothic architecture for you, do you want another serving with that? My friend informs me that the locals like to watch tourists trying, in increasingly ridiculous poses, to get a photo of the whole structure. We are thwarted in our first attempt to see the interior by a blockade of priests, they are preparing for the 12 noon service. The second attempt brings me into a glorious world of ecclesiastical art. The mosaics on the floor of the chapel with three kings in particular, which depict various woman (female saints?) with different churches of Cologne resting on their laps. The latest addition is a wonderful, vibrant window of modern art stained glass which matches the colours of the older windows perfectly.

The glorious Rhine in full sunshine. Lot of of chance for photo nerding (camera clamped to my eye as I try to take sneaky pictures of people enjoying the sun, including a wedding couple.)

The famous Cologne railway Bridge which is covered in lovers’ padlocks of all different shapes and size. My favourite has to be a turtle and the padlock for one of Cologne’s football teams who were wishing for the luck to make the next division [my friend says they have no chance].

On the way back across the bridge we had to dodge no one, but two, guided tours by Segway. Yes you read that right. Segway. Large, lazy people who look affronted that they have to move their Segway a little to the left to avoid me and other pedestrians who were walking on the footpath. I’m also not sure the safety and comfort of a being on a Segway in a town which has so many cobbled streets.

Afternoon:

Cemetery: A city break isn’t complete without a trip to at least one cemetery. This one is a beautiful, quiet green space which masks the noise from the busy road that runs along one side. It’s also filled with nature and much to my delight a red squirrel bounds round one of the large fir trees and my friend and I track its progress through the treetops with childish delight. It is amazing what tufty ears, bushy tail and the deep russet red can do for what is essentially a rat. We also spot a mouse zipping between the gravestones.

There are the usual array of angels (not weeping) on graves and, as we pass gigantic edifices of stone, I begin to wonder about commissioning such graves. Yes, I’d like a life size replica of a Grecian circle of columns please. What’s the going rate for a semi naked, muscular man in mining boots? I’d like a sci-fi metal sculpture with a sphere on a stick, if that isn’t too much trouble.

I never really find cemeteries too creepy, but I have to pause a moment and talk about a family grave where what was probably the favourite Teddy Bear pokes out from beneath the tombstone, its paws splayed against a plastic partition wall, as if it has just crawled from the grave. Terribly moving, sad and just a little bit demonic.

When I return home photos will be added to this post to illustrate these unusual tombstones.

A street market where the air is filled with the smell of less than fresh fish and the tunes of kitschy German music. My friend and I are lucky enough to find the perfect plush animal present for a birthday party we’re attending, a hippo, on one of the stalls.

Gift room: A temporary glass and wooden outdoor cupboard where people can leave books, clothing, cds, videos etc. for others to take for free. This is a brilliant ideas and encourages a sense of community.

Trying to navigate London during the commuter hours is never an entirely pleasant experience. But this morning isn’t the worst time I’ve had catching the tube. It’s awash with people who are all lost in their own individual orbits of their morning routines. And like planets in space, they avoid mid-tube change collisions blindly, with easy of practice while I dip and dodge and apologies profusely for interrupting this cosmic dance. Being in their own worlds means they don’t notice the moth trapped on the jubilee line train, futilely bumping along the strip lights of the carriage until it exhausts itself. Perhaps it’s the soul of morning friendliness which has clearly escaped from those in the carriage.

Boarding the Eurostar is quite like being at an airport but people in the queues don’t take the security as seriously, much to the exasperation of the station staff who are constantly barking out orders for people to remove their belts. I have no sympathy for the idiots in front of me who, with stinking hangovers, take an age of the earth to get all the spare change from where they have secreted it on their person. My bra, it seems, is an object of suspicion which sets off the security gate, and the little pads they search you with. The trials of being a busty woman.

The train departs on time, there’s a first. Cloud has descended on the countryside like a cataract, blurring the lines of churches, villages and fields into impressionist smudges. I’m lucky enough to get two seats to myself, but this is countered by the fact that I am surrounded by Belgian school kids on a trip. To deal with their constant chatter the man across the aisle falls asleep as soon as the train starts and fills the carriage with contented snoring.

We emerge from the channel tunnel to an austere landscape of concrete, barbed wire, endless empty train track and car parks before breaking the zone of immigration to the French countryside. Undulating, patches of brown, green and yellow are lent a gloomy air by the low thick cloud. The only real difference between here and home are the design of the electricity pylons.

Our escape from the coast is an escape from the cloud, sunlight adds softness to the edges of the land which is incredibly flat, so unlike the constant modulations of Yorkshire. Village churches are squat, hunkered down in defence position, with spires that twist like witches hats.

After a stand off in the seat in front where a stubborn Brit and and unyielding Belgian fight over who gets the double booked seat, I offer the spare place next to me and a now jolly Belgian in the brightest canary yellow trousers I have ever seen.

Spending two hours in Brussels Midi train station is a little bit like being trapped in a particularly difficult computer game. I’m not entirely sure what tasks I need to complete to escape this dungeon level and get stuck in a loop of eateries. The successful gamer eventually gets a drink and food, although do not make the error of getting fries without a drink because the penalty is an expensive smoothie.

One particularly interesting mini game concerns the finding of a socket to charge your phone/tablet/computer. This involves an exercise bike where peddling generates the electricity to charge your portable device. Actually I think this is a pretty genius invention.

Train number two is fancy, even economy on the ICE sports wooden panelling and nice navy carpets. I share my seat with a lady who is perfectly coordinated in shades of blue right down to watch earrings and book she is reading, german translation of The Cuckoo’s Calling.

Last point of interest is the station at Liege-Guillemins which is an impressive piece of modern art, if you like the feeling of being inside a giant whale skeleton.

It’s been a week since I blogged as part of the My Writing Process – Blog Tour. In that post I admitted, sheepishly, that I hadn’t found anyone to nominate… but, after posting, one of the other PhD candidates at my university, and a fellow writer, asked if she could be part of the blog tour.

My former PhD buddy and York writer extraordinaire, Helen Cadbury, invited me to take part in this blog tour about writing process. [Click on her name above to see her answers to the questions below.] I find it fascinating to see how different writers work, there as many processes as there are writers really, and I must admit I might be trying out some of the other bloggers techniques to overcome my own moments of procrastination.

Apologies in advance, this blog is the end of this particular chain. I haven’t had the time to seek out other blogger writers to nominate. So my little branch will be filled with blossomy details of my process and you’ll have to backtrack and try Helen’s other nominee, who hopefully will keep the vine alive.

So to the questions…

1) What am I working on?

I’m what I think might be termed a magpie writer, or a writer with a severe case of creative ADHD.

Writers are magpies, stealing the shiny stories from everyday life – image from here

I tend to have more than one project on the go and perform a complex juggling game with deadlines. At present I’m working on…

A feature film script for a sci-fi cop thriller with a genetic modification twist.

As you can see I have an issue with focusing on one project. [Side note: this does not include all the shorts, flash fiction pieces and the medieval web series I’m working on.]

Is all this healthy? Probably not, I was on verge of a creative mental meltdown around Christmas 2013 and vowed never to work on more than two projects at once… see how well that worked.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

We all bring our slightly different experiences to everything we write, so in a really simple answer to this question my work differs because it’s mine, it’s focused on my own skewed view point of the world.

As for a more complex answer…I’m not sure. As I write scripts in genres like sci-fi and action adventure, which usually have female protagonists that in itself is a difference.

Think about the last time you saw a strong female lead in a sci-fi film, there’s Ripley from Alien franchise but in the last couple of years the tent pole films have all been about guys – Star Trek, Oblivion, Elysium, Iron Man 3…

One strong influence on my work in the last decade has been Japanese Anime, since seeing Spirited Away I’ve been hooked. There is a real freedom in the blend of genre tropes, characters and styles in anime that I love and that makes me think more freely about what can and can’t go into my writing in particular genres. I talk about this in detail in an interview for One&OtherTV here. Anime also makes up part of my PhD research so I can see it continuing to influence and inspire my work in the future.

3) Why do I write what I do?

Again there’s a simple answer: because I find these genres fun and exciting to create in.

And a more complex version… I used to think I had to write things that were worthy or overly complicated and, let’s face it, full of pseudo intellectual pretentiousness. Being a bright kid at school I was quickly encouraged to abandon children’s fiction for the ‘classics’ both modern and older. I got stuck somewhere in the Victorian period [not that I’m complaining, my stage plays have been adaptations of Victorian/Edwardian Literature which I still love].

After studying for my MFA in California I realised that I was being an idiot. Of course I could write whatever I wanted – I have to say a big thanks to a professor out there who ran a ‘writing for the family audience’ screenplay class which knocked most of my pretentious attitude out of me.

4) How does your writing process work?

As I said in answer to the first question my process is one of juggling multiple projects. I think I like to have at least two on the go to flip between if my writing on one is getting stale or I reach an plot/character impasse. I’m a great believer in the power of the subconscious to solve any writing problems if it is given enough time/space/material. I’m a huge consumer of story in all forms, films/tv/anime/comics/fiction/plays/newspaper articles, I feel I have to understand what is out there if I’m going to add to or subvert a genre.

I’ve always been someone who is inspired by visuals so my process involves trawling photos and the internet for images that I can modify to become locations in stories or objects that can become macguffins [or mcguffin or maguffin]. In the same sense I like to travel, visit museums, walk in the countryside. I can’t over emphasize how important this is to my work for generating ideas to not be cooped up in only one space. Not being able to come up with an idea is an alien concept to me, I’m constantly inspired by the world around me, both the real physical world and the digital one. Having the time/brain capacity to get all these ideas down in correct format is more of an issue for me.

Research is also pretty key to my work, whether I’m creating in speculative futures of my own imagining or recreating the landscapes of the past I like to put in the time to research properly. Maybe this is because I’m one of those irritating people who will read/watch something and complain when the details aren’t right.

Image reference board for one of my previous projects

As for getting stories on paper, since I got into screenwriting about 5 years ago I’ve become an uber-planner. I like to have a detailed outline done before I start any script pages. This way I can work out a lot of the plot holes and iffy character motivation moments before I’m in love with the pages I’ve written.

Recently I’ve gotten into a habit of writing first drafts in 2-4 weeks. It’s really important to get to the end of the script, because until then you really can’t start to edit and turn the story into something that’s actually good. The first draft is never any good, I’ve pretty much gotten over the mental hurdle of realising this, so I vomit it out as quickly as possible [after research preparation] so that I can start cleaning up and feeling better about the story.

My final point on process is something that is occurring as I work further into my PhD by creative practice. I am becoming more aware of the reasons behind my creative decisions. Not in an overly analysing way, it isn’t detrimental or freezing to my process. I feel I have a pretty good gut instinct for the stories I tell, the locations I place scenes in, but now I am beginning to really understand why my gut tells me to do these things. Perhaps that has nothing to do with my PhD and is just my maturing as a writer, still it has occurred after I’ve started to really pick things apart for my academic research and so I feel they must be linked.

So I think that’s it… again I apologise that this is the end of this particular chain but I hope you’ve found this interesting or at least mildly amusing.

Last Wednesday I took a day trip to Durham, primarily to attend a seminar run by the Inventions of the Text series in the English Department [a department I was attached to, with the History, department for BA]. I saw BioShock and games narrative mentioned in one of the papers and we’ll, what’s an academic nerd girl going to do but turn up?

BioShock was one of the games that I had hoped to include in my PhD thesis before I realised that I just wasn’t going to have the words to do the research justice. As I am on a PhD by Creative Practice course my thesis is only 30-40,000 words, which is less than half a normal PhD thesis. My initial scope of film, anime and video games was a little over ambitious.

This doesn’t change the fact that the game BioShock fits all the criteria for my PhD research. It is set in a posthuman noir world with a very unreliable narrator/protagonist who navigates the gamer through the genetically modified nightmare of Rapture.

BioShock is a first person shooter game where the player inhabits the view point of Jack, a guy who is on an airplane that crashes in the sea near a lighthouse in 1960. On reaching the lighthouse Jack finds it is actually the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, built by Andrew Ryan as a place where science and the arts could flourish outside of government control, or any control for that matter. Jack soon discovers that the citizens of Rapture made a breakthrough in genetic engineering through use of ADAM a substance harvested from sea slug, granting the citizens superhuman powers called plasmids.

As the trailer makes very clear this is a game which revolves around choices; the player’s, the characters’, the moral and the immoral decisions we will make to survive. This is what makes the twist and turns the player experiences as Jack all the more challenging.

Amnesiac playable characters are pretty common in computer games, they allow for important information about the world of the game to be explained to the gamer without it feeling too expositionally clunky. [NB – not always a successful strategy.] The first person shooter POV also places the gamer right into the view point of the character, usually with a pair of hands wielding weapons of mass destruction in front of you.

I’m not a huge fan of first person games, I think growing up playing Tomb Raider has made me feel more comfortable seeing the whole of my character on screen, from an over their shoulder P.O.V. But I warmed to BioShock because visually and narratively there was a lot of draw me in.

Now what makes BioShock different and unsettling is the twist in the identity of the unreliable, amnesiac protagonist. For two thirds of the game, you bomb along, following the directions of friendly rebellion leader Atlas, trying to survive the bat-shit crazy citizens of Rapture so you can escape to the surface and get your old life back. So far so ordinary for this type of game until the designers pull the rug from under your feet.

The fact that the playable character, the gamer’s identity within the game, is revealed to be false, a clone of Andrew Ryan who Fontane/Altas, designed to take out the king of Rapture, really sucker punches the gamer. Like the main character, the gamer believed they had some autonomy in the game world, they could explore where they wanted and could make large moral decisions like whether to harvest [kill] or free the Little Sister characters

But Jack, and the gamer, never really had any freewill and now ‘would they kindly’ play by the rules of the designers and die…

This brought the gamer to think about the horror of the game’s thematic concepts of brain washing, genetic cloning and control, but also to think about the process of playing videogames in general. Once you engage in playing a game you surrender your freewill to the game’s mechanics, don’t you? Or do you?

That issue was the crux of the paper given by Dr. Julian Reidy at the Inventions of the Text Seminar, titled “You just complicate the narrative!” Computer games as ‚Erzählspiele’ (narrative games). [That’s a quote from BioShock Infinite, by the way, Daisy Fitzroy shouts it at Booker in one of the alternative realities.]

Video game criticism usually falls into a debate between ludology [it’s all about playing the game] and narratology [it’s the story, stupid]. Some critics feel that because the gamer is constrained by the rules of the game world, there is little room for the interpretation that occurs when someone reads a book or reads a piece of art and therefore games cannot exist as art in their own right. [I’m paraphrasing terribly and overly simplifying.] Needless to say this is something I disagree with.

Dr, Reidy posited a two way communication between gamer and game, demonstrating that narratives are developed from even the most simplistic game mechanisms, the gamer can’t help creating them; story cannot be cut from mechanism, they co-exist.

Moving on to BioShock Infinite he examined how the latest in the BioShock series [and the original game, in my opinion] draws the gamer’s attention to how they, and the playable character, complicate and reinvent the narrative—an attitude not much different from the way we engage with literature or history. Interesting, huh? And you thought it was all about mashing guys in the face with a skyhook…

Hopefully the article this talk was based on will be published and translated from German into English soon so that I can read and rethink the points raised.

[The talk also sparked a thought on my recent gaming/viewing.I’ve been revisiting the Silent Hill game series while watching Twin Peaks for the first time… Do we think Silent Hill 2 can be read as a game version of a Lynch film/show? I don’t know, but there are a lot of visual and narrative similarities.]

The second talk was given by a PhD candidate at UCL, George Potts, titled ‘You seen The Godfather?’ – The Sopranos and the postmodern gangster. The discussion revolved on the ways that fact and fiction inform each other.

The Sopranos exists in a modern world where the gangster characters would have seen films like the Godfather trilogy or Goodfellas. The show uses these already established media pieces to take apart the idea of the gangster, separating fact from fiction and howing the blurs in reality.

This got me thinking about my own creative work. How many times have I reacted to a horror movie by thinking ‘Why would they do that, haven’t they seen a horror movie before?’ I find characters who exist in ‘present day’ versions of reality who haven’t experienced the same cultural devices that we have stand out. It’s the same as writing a movie now without smart phones.

Any character of my generation or below—without a good excuse of growing up beyond the reach of electricity—would be hard pushed to not mention Tomb Raider, Indiana Jones, Uncharted or even Harry Potter when faced with an action adventure scenario. Are these references avoided because there is some copyright law doom looming or just writer oversight?

I reference the above Indiana Jones scene—the running behind the gong in the opening of Temple of Doom—when two characters in my adventure film attempt a similar trick to escape bad guys. “It worked in Indiana Jones, didn’t it?” says the love interest. “But that was a film!” the heroine retorts.

It felt natural that these characters, who were obsessed with archaeology, history and myth as kids, would have at least seen Indiana Jones movies. Movie referencing is part of our everyday slang, our short cut language of the twenty first century. I wonder if any character can feel realistic if they never reference games or films or tv shows? Is this any different from character referencing literature, poetry or myths?

I don’t know the answers, just ponder the questions…

So the seminar series did exactly what it should have, it provoked new academic and creative thoughts. It was an interesting, exciting and mentally stimulating evening.

Yesterday I took a day trip to Durham, primarily to attend a seminar run by the Inventions of the Text series in the English Department [ a department I was attached to, with the History department, for BA]. I saw BioShock and games narrative mentioned one of the papers and we’ll, what’s an academic nerd girl going to do but turn up?

The talk wasn’t until 5.30pm so I took the opportunity to explore an exhibition at Palace Green library which I’d wanted to see since I’d heard it announced in November 2013. Let me set the scene, palace green is the grassy area on the Durham peninsula hill, between the old castle [now a college] and the cathedral. It’s a place steeped in history and so the perfect location for an exhibition on… wait for it… Robots!

Yes, you read that correctly, in a departure from their last exhibition on the historic Lindisfarne Gospels, the library traveled the other direction in time for inspiration to the imagined future of robotics. It is a little exhibition but one that is well thought out and jam packed with a variety of robots from the utopian to the dystopian. There are the familiar friendly faces in life size models of C3PO, R2D2, Kryten and Ironman, to the more dubious Borg [a Picard Borg model] Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet and a T-800 head.

The informational text panels are in a delightful computer style font, some in the green of older computer screens – a colour used to great effect in The Matrix. Attention is given to difference between Robots, Cyborgs and Androids, and to some very early examples of clockwork men, a sketch by Charles Dickens as ‘Boz’ being one of those examples.

I’d definitely recommend a visit if you are around Durham before the exhibition closes on 27th April.
With some more time to kill in the afternoon I took the long walk up the hill, past the science site of the university to the Oriental Museum [yes, not the most culturally sensitive name]. It should have been a pleasant walk but the heavens opened and pelted me with hail for most of the twenty minutes that I marched up hill.

The museum covers objects from China, Korea, Japan, Ancient Egypt, the Islamic world and South East Asia. Despite the list of cultures it is again a small museum, established in 1960, it was designed to allow students of oriental languages access to materials from the cultures which shaped the development of those languages.

Articulated snake, photo by me

One of the objects that caught my eye was this articulated snake, made in Japan in the nineteenth century.Last year I adapted Sherlock Holmes and The Speckled Band for a site specific theatre production at The Treasurer’s House in York for Theatre Mill. Now anyone familiar with the story will know why this item caught my attention – a replacement prop, perhaps, for the next time the play rolls out.

The museum has a real mix of different objects, both old and really modern – in the Japanese section there is a clothing cabinet which houses a beautifully intricate wedding kimono, covered in cranes and cherry blossom, next to a similarly intricate cosplay costume for a character from a recent anime/manga phenomenon Black Butler [Kuroshitsuji]

They also currently have a exhibition of modern Japanese Prints, mainly woodblocks, which I’ll admit I have a soft spot for. After the visit I have another couple of names to add to my list of artists whose work I like. There’s the otherworldly, geometric precision of Shiomi Nana whose use of the contrast between red, cream and black is strikingly beautiful.

On the more nostalgic end of the scale there’s the work of Ohtsu Kazuyuki which depicts Japanese landscapes with emotional tenderness, invoking traditional past and giving the viewer a snap shot into a memory of Japan.

The colours in A Clear Autumn Day, along with the perspective and style, made me think of the worlds created in Miyazaki’s movies, there’s something of the artist’s house in Kiki’s Delivery Service here, isn’t there?

Again, if you can bare the walk, the Oriental Museum is a nice distraction for an hour and you never know, you might be inspired.

Read the next post for my thoughts on the two talks given at the seminar…

“You just complicate the narrative!” Computer games as ‚Erzählspiele’ (narrative games).
‘You seen The Godfather?’ – The Sopranos and the postmodern gangster.